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Saturday, April 3, 2010

Blue Gold: World Water Wars showing at theatres throughout Japan

Water, water every where,nor any drop to drink...

This epic line from the Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the ironic doom of sailors lost at sea, surrounded by water, none of which can quench their deadly thirst.

We, too, are like those very crew members, lost to thickening seas of polluted, plastic soup, due to our negligence and abuse of the mother of life as we know it--Water. This way of life is leading us to a global water crisis.

Award winning, Blue Gold: World Water Wars takes us straight to the source of the water crisis by exploring how U.S., Canadian, British, French, and Japanese multinational corporations--by trying to privatize water as a commodity--are polluting and diverting water resources at the expense of local communities, resuling in large-scale desertification and wars fought over the most precious resource on our planet.

...a type of conflict (most probably a form of guerrilla warfare) due to an acute shortage of water for drinking and irrigation. About 40 per cent of the world’s populations are already affected to some degree, but population growth, climate change and rises in living standards will worsen the situation: the UN Environment Agency warns that almost 3 billion people will be severely short of water within 50 years. Possible flash points have been predicted in the Middle East, parts of Africa and in many of the world’s major river basins, including the Danube. The term has been used for some years to describe disputes in the southern and south-western United States over rights to water extraction from rivers and aquifers.

Yet, there is hope. Including interviews of New Delhi-based environmental activist and author, Vandana Shiva, Oscar Olivera, the industrial worker and spokesperson for Coalition in Defense of Water and Life who led the Bolivian uprising against US multinational Bechetal, and countless other inspiring individuals and organizations, Blue Gold provides us with realistic examples of how we can reverse the water crisis if we act now.

By taking the viewer into the lives of those struggling, often successfully, for their basic rights to water, the film challenges us to critique and challenge economic and political systems that forfeit our lives to global corporations. As Blue Planet Project founder, Maude Barlow proclaims: “This is our revolution, this is our war”.

Blue Gold will be showing in theaters all throughout Japan in April.

Click on the link to each theater for more information:Kanazawa @ Cine Monde (4/17-23 at 12:30pm)

Understanding the need to spread knowledge about the water crisis, producer Sam Bozzo, who created the film at his own expense, has agreed to allow the film to be downloaded as a DVDRip from the Pirate Bay and One BitTorrent. However, this blogger requests that downloaders support his work with a donation that can be made through the Blue Gold website.